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Friday, 15 June 2012

Swansea South Wales Evening Post for June 13
carried an editorial which, in the context of cuts to the police, called
for us to ‘accept as reality…substantial cuts in public spending,’ they were
‘inevitable’ and there could be ‘no ifs or buts about the need for cuts.’ What
follows is the email I sent their letters page.

Your editorial on June 13th
– ‘Cutbacks part of today’s reality’ – presented an opinion as if it were an
objective fact. In fact ‘substantial cuts in public sector spending’ are NOT
inevitable. You might have found one poll that thought this – there have been
other polls that showed the opposite. Public sector cuts are being promoted by
a certain sector of the political elite around the Cameron/Clegg coalition, and
given full backing by the media. This
opinion has little resonance among the vast majority of public sector workers and
union members, counted in the millions nationwide.

You would do well to remember
that many of these live in Swansea. In fact, public sector workers represent a
huge 31.76 % of the total workforce. The position of Swansea Trades Council is one
of complete opposition to the cuts, as was that of the 2,000 people, both
public and private sector workers, who marched through Swansea on 30th
November last year. The ‘there is no alternative’ brigade pretends that what is
really a set of political decisions is an inevitable fact. Many of us feel it
is not an inevitable fact, and on 20 October we will be taking to the streets
in our hundreds of thousands to join the Trades Union Congress march calling
for a different economic strategy.

What would be an alternative?
Well, the government could take its taxation of the rich and of the big
companies seriously for a start. Although these are times of austerity for
ordinary people, there seems to be no squeeze on the bosses of Britain’s biggest
companies. Chief executives of FTSE 100 firms pocketed an average of £4.8
million each last year. More than a quarter of them took a pay rise of over 41
percent. Simply taxing at the levels Thatcher did in the 1980s would raise
billions. Neither would this be electorally unpopular – the vast majority of
people would like to see something done about the scandal of fat cat pay. In
addition, the hugely expensive white elephant of Trident replacement could be
abandoned, and the equally profligate, pointless and unpopular occupation of
Afghanistan could be brought to an end as well. These swallow up billions each
year.

The real problem at the
moment is not the budget deficit. Britain had a much larger deficit at the end
of the second world war and went on to build the NHS and the welfare state. The
real problems globally are unemployment and lack of growth: this has been
recognised by Obama in the US, and the recent elections in France and Greece reflect
this. Increasing numbers of people doubt that austerity is working, or indeed
can work. They fear that it will do just the opposite – it will destroy
national economies.

In truth, as economists like
Paul Krugman and commentators like the Guardian’s Larry Elliott will tell you, if
you take an axe to the public sector you will deepen the recession. There is no
Chinese Wall between the public and private sectors, especially after
successive waves of privatisation. Cuts to the public sector are already having
a chilling effect on the private sector. For example, education cuts mean
schools abandon building programmes, which drives construction firms out of
business and throws construction workers on the dole.

Then there is the effect on
consumers and on tax revenues. In your editorial you point out the dangers of
“tax revenues…falling at their fastest since 1923”. Exactly. What sort of
impact will throwing millions of public sector workers out of work have? Massive amounts of revenue will vanish to be
replaced by greater payouts in unemployment benefit. Remember - the vast
majority of UK cuts – 94% - are still to come. Is this a serious strategy for achieving economic stability? Many see it
as a suicidal programme which will put both the UK’s and the world economy into
a ‘death spiral’ that will make the 1930s look like a tea party.

But of course none of this
matters, because the Conservatives in the UK and the right-wing Republicans in
the US have their own agenda. If you read Naomi Kline’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’
you will see how far-right economic fundamentalists have since the 1970s used
successive economic crises to remodel society to benefit the rich and powerful.
This is precisely what is happening now: Cameron and Osborne are intent on
‘shrinking the state’, getting rid of the NHS and handing the public sector
over to their rich chums. That is why their plans make no economic sense. And
that is why public sector cuts are not inevitable.

Saturday, 9 June 2012

It’s been a week in which many
people seemed to be intent on sabotaging their own best interests. Like US
workers in 2004 voting for a president who would savage their health and
welfare and give huge tax cuts to the super-rich, it seemed the masses either
didn’t know what was good for them, or else were masochistically bent on their
own self-destruction.

In 21st century Britain,
at a time when austerity is the watchword, when the government is launching a
programme of cuts, and money is hard to come by, a million people can, it
seems, be persuaded that a clutch of inbred aristocrats are so ‘special’ that
they will turn out in the rain to cheer them, and, presumably, the millions we
spend each year to keep them in luxury. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, in the
state of Wisconsin, where last year thousands of trade unionists launched mass
protests against the removal of collective bargaining rights, Governor Scott Walker
won the vote in a recall election that has given the green light for huge
attacks on the US trade union movement.

Although the latter is
clearly the more serious of the two events, I want to spend a minute on the
Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. These sort of events are always
particularly irksome if you are a republican or anti-monarchist. The whole mass
media goes into hyperbole mode, insisting that ‘the whole nation’ is as one in
supporting, nay, adoring the monarch, leaving aside the fact that millions do
not.

Even if we look at it in
geographical terms, the ‘nation’ is far from being ‘one’. The BBC’s Scotland
correspondent James Cook asked: ‘Is Scotland’s Jubilee Flagging?’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-18317092concluding
that large swathes of Scotland, ‘show no visible enthusiasm for the Windsors’.

Although this is a subjective
observation, in West Wales too, driving through Llanelli and Swansea on
Saturday, I saw very little of either civic or domestic bunting (the latter
being a rough rule of thumb for public support). It is not just that the wider
support for socialistic ideas down here tends towards the anti-monarchist, but Welsh
nationalists, too, resent the fact that an English aristocrat calls himself
‘the Prince of Wales.’ Although this is not to say there is no support for the
Queen down here (there clearly is) it is to say that there is less of it than
in the English heartlands, and that what there is, is more nuanced, more questioning,
much more conditional. The BBC tends to relate even the weather forecast primarily
to the South East of England, and this demographic bias, as a matter of course,
over-estimates the depth and breadth of popular support for the royal family.
In fact the wall-to-wall 24-hour over-the-top BBC coverage was a turn-off to
many, as we shall see.

Nonetheless, the adoration directed
at the British royals is extraordinary. On one level those sane adults who
indulge it must be aware it is based upon a delusional, irrational notion – namely,
that one particular blood line of aristocrats is, by virtue of its DNA,
special, even godlike. That an institution based upon such a preposterous idea
should have survived into the 21st century is a testament to the
power of PR, spin and marketing, but something more than that sustains it.

The royal family fulfils an
important unifying function for the British establishment and ruling class.
Otherwise it would have vanished long ago. Its message is that national identity
is supremely important, that it unites us before a woman who is above class,
above the dirty games of political parties and elections. In some obscure way
she represents us, she symbolises our history. Untroubled by the ebb and flow
of electoral politics, she is a constant, with whom we identify as mother of
the nation.

And funnily enough, as
politicians themselves sink in popular esteem, being now regarded as a species
somewhat below the bedbug, so the Queen becomes more transcendent. As politics
becomes ever more debased and corrupt, so she shines ever brighter above the
sorry mess. Bread and circuses was the formula which kept the ancient Roman
masses quiescent: enough food to keep people from rioting, and the distraction
of spectacle. And in London in the 21st century we have processions
and military aircraft and a barge made of gold. The royals fulfil a symbolic
function, certainly, but that is not to say they have no power. The only thing
lacking is bread for the people. But then as the food parcel returns the
diversion of the extravaganza becomes even more important.

This is 21st
century Britain, and symbols can cut both ways. Circuses are particularly
welcome in hard times. But as the rich and the poor sectors of society polarise
ever more violently, hard times have a funny way of finding their way into the
spectacle, like grave worms bursting through a whited sepulchure. As the royals were warmly tucked up in bed after
the Jubilee celebrations, 30 ‘jobseekers’ – the patronising name of successive
governments for unemployed people – and another 50, on apprentice wages, were dumped
in the middle of London in the pouring rain to work as stewards for the Jubilee
river pageant. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/04/jubilee-pageant-unemployed?intcmp=239The appalling
details of their employment by Close Protection UK, who told them to sleep
under London Bridge, gave them no changing rooms, no access to toilets for 24
hours, and all for no pay, caused widespread revulsion. The government had to
issue denials but the juxtaposition of hugely expensive royal celebrations
alongside unemployed people on slave labour sickened many.

So, despite the best efforts
of the BBC to present the Jubilee as a transcendent act of collective worship,
the fly in the ointment’s scaly legs waved and distracted attention. Tom Watson
– deputy chair of the Labour Party – felt emboldened enough to dismiss the
celebrations as a ‘show of opulence by state elites’, eliciting an immediate
shit storm from the Tory media. At the same time Ed Miliband decided now was
the time to stake his claim for patriotism, averring , in a widely trailed
speech, that politicians should ‘talk more about Englishness.’ Why they should
he did not make clear. While it is understandable that the Scots and the Welsh
should wish to stress their identity to stop their distinctive minority culture
being swallowed up under an English dominated monoculture, it is less clear
that the English need or want to do this.

The backlash even struck
those breathless, shiny monarchy-lovers at the BBC. Their relentless coverage,
together with the banal and platitudinous commentaries, was too much for some.
There were 3000 complaints. The modern BBC audience obviously wants to be
entertained, for god’s sake, and these days is not prepared to just watch a
flotilla, even a royal flotilla, floating around for hours to a badly-prepared
and inane voiceover.

However, at times when in
other countries large gatherings of people on the streets are usually
accompanied by tear gas and police batons, the fact is that in Britain large crowds
turned out waving union flags for the Queen. In the Guardian Jonathan Haidt tried
to explain a similar tendency, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jun/05/why-working-class-people-vote-conservative, claiming that the propensity of blue-collar voters to
ally themselves with the political right, against their own material interests,
is a global phenomenon . I thought of the recent vote in Wisconsin in favour of
retaining Governor Walker, opening the door to a wave of attacks on US trade
unions. In both these cases – the UK’s Jubilee and the recall vote in the US, large
numbers of working-class people have been induced to identify with a person and
a cause that not only does not advance their interests but may actually harm
them.

There are obvious differences
between the two cases, and the events are so heavily mediated that
interpretation of either cannot be clear and simple. Reasons for voting in a
particular way are usually complex, as are reasons for standing in the rain
waving a little Union Jack. However, my main objection to Haidt’s explanation
is that he sees the whole thing in terms of individual psychology, in this case
to do with the fact that conservatives apparently have a ‘broader moral palate’
than leftists. Exactly what this insight means and how we use it are not made
clear.

Actually, the notion of the
working-class Tory would not have been surprising to Marx. Workers accepting,
even voting for reactionary ideas is not some new phenomenon. Notions of
alienation and false consciousness go back to Hegel . One of the basic
propositions of Marxism is that it is not ideas that shape the state of
society, but the state of society that shapes ideas. The generally-held notions
in society reflect the way society is organised. For example, in feudal times
the rigid division between lords and serfs was accepted as natural and
inevitable, as ‘ordained by God.”’ Modern capitalist society is founded on the
profit motive – so this is thought of as ‘natural.’ Such ideas do more than
simply reflect society : they justify it and the current class divisions
embedded in it. “The ruling ideas of any age,” as Marx said, “will be the ideas
of the ruling class.”

Anybody looking at modern
society will see the dynamic of this process. The ruling class controls the
channels for the formation and dissemination of ideas, the education system and
mass media: its ideas are dominant here. But this is more than a ‘conspiracy’
to ‘brainwash’ workers: capitalist ideas seem to make sense because they
reflect the world as we experience it. Businesses are run for profit, society is
divided up into classes: believing that these things are ‘natural’ and ‘true’
seems common sense. So there is nothing surprising about the working-class
Tory. If capitalist ideology didn’t dominate workers’ thinking in this way
capitalism couldn’t survive at all. It is by no means the case that if people
are oppressed and exploited, they automatically develop socialist ideas. The
spread of socialist ideas on a mass scale must have a material base.

In the same way as capitalist
ideas dominate workers’ thinking because they reflect their daily experience,
so the spread of socialist ideas will reflect changes in that daily experience.
For example, the recent huge growth in support for the left wing Syriza
coalition in Greece did not come about because they found new and better ways
of propagandising their political ideas, or that they suddenly discovered the
internet. It happened because the dramatic changes in Greek society meant that
their ideas came to resonate with the lived experience of masses of people.
Things that had previously sounded outlandish became instead ‘common sense’.

It is not intensity or depth
of suffering that creates revolutionary and socialist ideas, but rather the
experience of fighting against that suffering. It is when levels of struggle
are high that workers are most likely to develop confidence in their ability to
change society, and to see that alternatives to capitalism are possible.
Capitalism, by its tendency to crisis, continuously precipitates periods of
intense class conflict, so that workers are forced to fight.This is the sort of period we have entered
now. Two years ago, commentators were remarking that the political left had
‘shot its bolt’: that at the time after the banking collapse, when socialist
ideas should have grown rapidly, the bankers and the governments had won the
argument. As usual, they thought that ideas were formed in the abstract, not in
the actual process of conflict and resistance itself.

Ideas, whether of deference
to royalty, or of collective contention through trade union action, can change
quickly as conditions within society change. The Egyptian masses’ ideas about
society and how it should be constituted changed rapidly as the huge crowds that
assembled in Tahrir Square began to feel their power.In the Greek general strikes workers’ ability
to run their own enterprises came forward as an alternative to what was on
offer. In the UK the biggest strikes since 1926 have given workers a glimpse of
how to resist the biggest attacks on their living standards for generations.

The revolts of millions
worldwide against austerity have, after decades, put revolution back on the
agenda. Revolution sees millions of people stand up for the first time and take
control of their society. It is necessary, said Marx, “not only because the
ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class
overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the
muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” It is through struggle that we change society
but also come to change ourselves.